{"product_id":"buffalo-bills-america-isbn-9780375726583","title":"Buffalo Bill's America","description":"William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was the most famous American of his age.  He claimed to have worked for the Pony Express when only a boy and to have scouted for General George Custer.  But what was his real story? And how did a frontiersman become a worldwide celebrity? In this prize-winning biography, acclaimed author  Louis S. Warren explains not only how Cody exaggerated his real experience as an army scout and buffalo hunter, but also how that experience inspired him to create the gigantic, traveling spectacle known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.  A dazzling mix of Indians, cowboys, and vaqueros, they performed on two continents for  three decades, offering a surprisingly modern view of the United States and a remarkably democratic version of its history. This definitive biography reveals the genius of America’s greatest showman, and the startling history of the American West that drove him and his performers to the world stage.\u003ci\u003eIntroduction \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eOne: \u003cb\u003ePony Express\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo: The \u003cb\u003eAttack on the Settler’s Cabin\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree: \u003cb\u003eThe Village . . . The Cyclone \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFour: \u003cb\u003eWith the Prince of Pistoleers \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFive: \u003cb\u003eGuide and Scout \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSix: \u003cb\u003eBuffalo Hunt \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART TWO\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eSeven: \u003cb\u003eTheater Star \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEight: \u003cb\u003eIndians, Horses \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNine: \u003cb\u003eDomesticating the Wild West \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTen: \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Drama of Civilization: \u003c\/i\u003eVisual Play and Moral Ambiguity \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEleven: \u003cb\u003eWild West London \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInterlude:\u003cb\u003e Broncho Charlie Miller \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwelve: \u003cb\u003eWild West Europe \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThirteen: \u003cb\u003eGhost Dance \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eInterlude:\u003cb\u003e Standing Bear \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eFourteen: \u003cb\u003eCowboys, Indians, and the Artful Deceptions of Race \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFifteen: \u003cb\u003eBuffalo Bill’s America \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eInterlude:\u003cb\u003e The Johnson Brothers \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART THREE\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eSixteen: \u003cb\u003eEmpire of the Home \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeventeen: \u003cb\u003eShowdown in Cheyenne \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eInterlude:\u003cb\u003e Adele Von Ohl Parker \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eEighteen: \u003cb\u003eEnd of the Trail \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIndex\u003c\/i\u003e“The most ambitious book ever published about Cody and his times. No one interested in Buffalo Bill, 19th-century show business or the many meanings of the American West will want to pass it up.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Warren writes with the tireless ebullience of a scholar in love with his material. . . . The grocery tabloids missed a good thing by not being around when Buffalo Bill was king of the box office.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Meticulously researched and entertaining. . . . A fascinating and accessible study of a man who . . . can still teach us today about how things are not always what they appear to be.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Portland Oregonian \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Not just a biography but an examination of the cultures of the eastern United States and Europe and their relationship with the American West.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post \u003c\/i\u003eLouis S. Warren took his B.A. at Columbia University and his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. at Yale University. He has taught at Yale, University of San Diego, and, since 1999, at the University of California, Davis, where he is currently Associate Professor of History. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America\u003c\/i\u003e (1997), which won the 1997 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Book, and several articles. His article on \"Cody's Last Stand\" in the Western Historical Quarterly won the Oscar O. Winther Award for best article (2003).\u003cb\u003e   Pony Express\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Former Pony Post rider will show how the Letters and Telegrams of   the Republic were distributed across the immense Continent previous to   the railways and the telegraph.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Like every other frontier reenactment in the Wild West show, the Pony   Express was a chapter in the life of its hero and his country. Before   audiences of thousands, the horseman-not Cody himself, but another   \"Former Pony Post\" rider-raced \"down to the grand stand at a gallop,\"   wrote one ecstatic viewer, \"checked his pony within a length, and   almost before it was at standstill the rider was on the ground, the bag   on another pony, and the man galloping off at full speed, in less time   than it would taken an ordinary man to dismount.\" It was a showstopper.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of course Buffalo Bill rode the Pony Express. Everyone who perused the   sixty or so printed pages of Wild West show programs could read it for   themselves. \"William F. Cody was born in Scott County, Iowa. He removed   at an early age to Kansas, and was employed as a herder, wagonmaster,   and pony express rider.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The more curious might buy a copy of Buffalo Bill's autobiography, also   for sale at the Wild West show. There they could read the story in   detail. Left fatherless at an early age, eleven, the young Kansas boy   ventured out to make money for his bereaved mother, five sisters, and   infant brother. Between his eleventh birthday, in 1857, and his   fifteenth, in 1861, he freighted wagons over the plains with rough   teamsters, befriended Wild Bill Hickok, was captured by enemy Mormons   in the government's abortive war against polygamy, survived a   starvation winter at Fort Bridger, skirmished with some Indians and   befriended others, prospected for gold in Colorado, and trapped beaver   on the Plains.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But of all the boyhood adventures William Cody claimed, those on the   Pony Express were the most astonishing, and the most famous. On his way   back to Kansas after failing to find gold at Pikes Peak, the   thirteen-year-old boy ambled into the Pony Express station at   Julesberg, Colorado, where he talked his way into his first Pony   Express job. His mother feared it would kill him. \"She was right about   this, as fifteen miles an hour on horseback would, in a short time,   shake any man 'all to pieces'; and there were but very few, if any,   riders who could stand it for a great length of time.\" But young Will   Cody took up his forty-five-mile route, and \"stuck to it for two   months,\" before he returned to Kansas to be with his mother, who had   fallen ill.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After she recovered, the boy and a friend tried their hand at trapping   beaver up the remote reaches of the Republican River, in western   Kansas. They lost an ox, and so were unable to move their wagon when   Cody slipped on the ice and broke his leg. Left behind while his friend   went for a replacement ox team, the young boy spent a month alone, and   avoided being killed by a Sioux war party only because its leader,   Chief Rain-in-the-Face, remembered meeting the young Will Cody at Fort   Laramie the previous year.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The following summer, in 1860, when he was fourteen, Cody returned to   Pony Express riding again, and his adventures made his previous   escapades seem pale in comparison. Warned that \"it will soon shake the   life out of you,\" he took up the most dangerous length of the Pony   Express route, the Sweetwater Division. This section was under the   supervision of John Slade, a notorious killer, but Cody recalled the   man as civil, even kind, in his autobiography.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"My boy, you are too young for a pony-express rider. It takes men for   that business.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I rode two months last year on Bill Trotter's division, sir, and   filled the bill then; and I think I am better able to ride now,\" said   I.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"What! are you the boy that was riding there, and was called the   youngest rider on the road?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \"I am the same boy,\" I replied, confident that everything was now all   right for me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The boy proved himself more than equal to the man-size job. Arriving at   the end of his seventy-six-mile stretch of road one day, he discovered   that the rider to whom he was to pass the specially designed saddlebag,   or mochila, had been killed in a drunken brawl the night before. Cody   \"did not hesitate for a moment to undertake an extra ride of   eighty-five miles to Rocky Ridge,\" where he arrived on time. \"I then   turned and rode to Red Buttes, my starting place, accomplishing on the   round trip a distance of 322 miles,\" which would go down in history as   one of the longest Pony Express rides ever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Shortly afterward, he outran an Indian attack, making a   twenty-four-mile run on one horse. Not much later, the Indians attacked   a company stagecoach between Split Rock and Three Crossings, and   managers suspended the pony service. During this lull, the young Cody   set out with his friend Wild Bill Hickok and a group of forty men \"who   had undergone all kinds of hardships and braved every danger\" to pursue   the Indians and recover stolen horses. They found the Indian encampment   up the Powder River, raided it, and returned \"with all of our own   horses and about one hundred captured Indian ponies.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ever since 1879, when William Cody first published his life story, this   childhood saga has been a favorite of the American public. The Wild   West show reprised it over and over again, the high-speed Pony Express   scene in Buffalo Bill's Wild West inscribing an almost indelible bond   between young America and the child Will Cody. The pony was featured in   the show's debut in 1883, and audiences from Omaha to New York,   Sarasota to Paris, thrilled to the display every year thereafter until   the show ended in 1916.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Cody's boyhood story of horseback days, of a boy who enters a man's   world too early, was a familiar one in some respects. Young Will, the   story's hero, is the victim of bad circumstances, but raises himself up   through hard work, ambition, and good luck, meeting powerful men such   as Chief Rain-in-the-Face, Wild Bill Hickok, and John Slade, who   patronize his efforts. Like a western version of Horatio Alger's Ragged   Dick, which had first appeared twelve years earlier, Cody's life story   was an exhortation to the sons of the middle class. It inspired faith   in the stage star, Buffalo Bill Cody, as a genuine western figure and a   respectable, middle-class icon for the urban middle classes who were   its intended audience. It extolled family, hard work, and willingness   to take risks-all virtues of the middle-class family in the industrial   age. \"Mr. Cody tells his story in a simple, unaffected style that   commands belief,\" wrote one reviewer, \"and it is about as full of   incident and adventure as its pages will allow.\" The book was   respectable, too, not like dime novels which corrupted the nation's   youth with romantic tales of theft and bloodshed. The reviewer doubted   that \"the perusal of the book will lure a single boy to run away from   school, steal a revolver and tramp to the border, for somehow the men   who know what frontier life really is always give the impression that   there is a great deal of downright hard work about the borderer's   life.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What if you wanted to know more about those Pony Express adventures?   The problem was there was not much to read on the subject other than   Buffalo Bill's autobiography and show programs. The freighting firm of   Russell, Majors, and Waddell created the Pony Express to carry mail   between Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in 1860.   The service was wildly popular, especially in California, where it was   memorialized in heroic tributes even as it began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But it lasted only eighteen months. When it ended, in 1861, the Civil   War had erupted. The epic clash of North and South at Shiloh,   Gettysburg, and the Wilderness absorbed the energies of almost every   American historian for the next three decades. Few attempted unpacking   the West until the 1880s. Nobody wrote a book-length history of the   Pony Express until after 1900.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the meantime, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show became the primary   keeper of the pony legend. By the 1890s, when William Lightfoot   Visscher began gathering material for his history of the Pony Express,   the business records of Russell, Majors, and Waddell had long since   vanished, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show had been promoting William   Cody's version of the pony's history for the better part of two   decades. Cody was the world's most renowned showman and westerner, and   had made himself far and away the most famous rider of the legendary   pony line. He was also a personal friend of Visscher's. When the   journalist's Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express   appeared in 1908, it was less history than hagiography, a devotional   recounting of the heroic lives of saints. The author repeated Cody's   stories without any criticism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Since then, every scholarly history of the Pony Express has mentioned   Buffalo Bill's adventures. Every generation of Americans has thrilled   to them in a succession of children's books and movies which have   retold his Pony Express days as wholesome, outdoor, familial   inspiration to American youth. To this day, William F. Cody's stature   as the most famous Pony Express rider of them all remains largely   unchallenged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Only the most devoted reader knows about the doubters. Some who knew   Cody said he was lying even in the 1880s. A few historians mention in   footnotes or even in the text of their books that his stories are   impossible to verify. A tiny minority have suggested he made the whole   thing up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Against these whispers, Cody biographers advance the standard of the   trustworthy guide. The most famous of these, Don Russell, long ago   concluded that Buffalo Bill mostly told the truth. Cody's account is   full of genuine figures from the Pony Express, and he pinpoints   locations of Indian battles with descriptions that are often accurate.   How could he have known so much if he was not there? Besides, William   Cody won the Medal of Honor for Indian fighting in 1872. He was already   a wealthy man and a stage star when he put the story in his   autobiography in 1879. He had no reason to lie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How much of the story was true? The search for answers is illuminating   in two ways. On the one hand, it may lead us to matters of fact, about   what really happened to the boy William Cody. On the other hand, poring   over Cody's stories, true and false, can point the way to deeper   truths. A man lies to mislead. But, as any detective can tell you, the   most deceptive liar reveals a great deal about himself through his   choice of untruths. Lies cover the teller's tracks, but they also   betray how he thinks. The line between truth and fiction in William   Cody's childhood story is less a boundary marker between the serious   and the trivial than a pathway to a deeper understanding of the man and   his age.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What we know of Cody's childhood comes largely from two sources: his   own autobiography, which he published in 1879, when he was already a   theatrical star, and the memoirs of his elder sister, Julia, which she   didn't pen till the early 1900s. The veracity of his autobiography is a   constant source of debate. Written in Rochester, New York, during his   off-season from the theater, it was a long press release meant to   enhance his already formidable star qualities. Cody shaped his life   story to meet public expectations and desires. Every single one of the   book's claims must be treated with care.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The question of its authorship endures. A coterie of press agents and   dime novelists churned out revised editions of the Cody autobiography   periodically through 1920. During the same period, dozens of   ghostwritten dime novels appeared under Buffalo Bill's authorship. Many   critics have lumped Cody's 1879 autobiography with the novels, as the   hokum of some advance man or another. But if the pages of some later   editions are purple with hack writers' clichés, the prose in this first   edition of his life story is markedly restrained (as reviewers noted at   the time). Moreover, it is full of what we know to be Cody's own   phrasing and tone. It contains a great deal of truth that only Cody   knew. If he did not write it, he dictated it. For all its many   fictions, it stands as Buffalo Bill Cody's own story of his life from   childhood to the age of thirty-three.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Julia Cody's memoirs offer some correctives to her brother's fantasies,   but she was understandably reluctant to contradict him. In many cases,   neither sibling was entirely truthful. Reading these two accounts   against one another, and weighing them against the handful of other   evidence we can muster, we begin to discern real events of his   childhood under the quilting of fiction which covered them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    William Cody, hero of the Indian wars, did outrun murderous enemies as   a boy. But they were not Indians. He did carry messages, but not the   U.S. mail. He had his first taste of combat as a very young man, but   when he first sighted down a rifle barrel at a man, it was likely not   at any Sioux or Cheyenne. The West of the boy William Cody was riven by   war on families, in which homes burned, and families were threatened,   scattered, or worse. War defined his life from the time he was eight   until he was about thirty. And in war he learned, above all else, the   vulnerability of family and home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    William Frederick Cody was born near Leclaire, Iowa, on February 26,   1846. His father, Isaac Cody, had been born in Canada and at the age of   seventeen had settled in Ohio with his parents and siblings. He was   already a widower when he met and married Mary Laycock in Cincinnati in   1840. Soon after, the couple, with Isaac's daughter from an earlier   marriage, Martha, moved to Iowa in search of new opportunities. William   Cody was the third child of Isaac and Mary, having been preceded by a   brother, Sam, in 1841, and a sister, Julia, in 1843. By 1853, there   were seven children at home, including the two brothers and a total of   five sisters: Martha, Julia, Eliza Alice, Laura Ella (often called   Helen), and Mary Hannah, called May. In Iowa, Isaac Cody managed large   farms for absentee owners, and ran a stage business between Davenport   and Chicago. The children recalled their father as a traveling man who   returned home between trips ferrying passengers across the wide   prairie. Sometimes the young Codys stood on the riverbank, watching as   Isaac's brightly colored wagon passed by on its way to or from Chicago.   The constant search for new opportunities led Isaac to consider joining   the gold rush to California. He changed his mind when he heard tales of   woe from returning emigrants and was unable to finance the trip.   Instead, he and Mary Cody settled on a move to Kansas Territory. Their   decision may have been motivated in part by the death of their eldest   son, Sam, crushed beneath a bucking mare in 1853, at the age of twelve.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300142108901,"sku":"NP9780375726583","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375726583.jpg?v=1767723153","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/buffalo-bills-america-isbn-9780375726583","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}